By VERONICA DAEHN
J Alumni News staff
On the south wall stand 25 TVs, each switched to a different news station. Most times, the volume’s turned low.
Next to the wall of news sits a police scanner. It’s turned loud enough for everyone to hear.
Across the room are rows of computers, mostly Apple Macs but also a couple PCs. This is where the students sit.
And around them are the offices of news-editorial and broadcasting professors in the College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Welcome to the newsroom of Andersen Hall
Also called the media center, the newsroom reflects a growing change in the journalism industry, said broadcasting Professor Rick Alloway.
“The model for journalists in the coming century is going to be more diversified,” Alloway said. “More knowledge about other forms of journalism makes our graduates more employable.”
And the cooperation of faculty members and students in both departments will lead to a better overall program, he said.
The spring semester will see the first major collaboration of departments, said Charlyne Berens, chairwoman of the news-editorial department.
Students will be able to take an elective class where they will work on an online publication called NewsNetNebraska. The site will start out with text and still photos but eventually will include audio and video clips as well, Berens said. It will be updated every four hours.
“That will give us more opportunities to work together,” she said.
Already the combined newsroom has led to more sharing of ideas and technology.
Both departments make use of the TVs, the police scanner, the phones and the computers.
“We share a lot of information and ideas,” Berens said. “It’s great. This is the media center. This is where we do what we do.”
The college had tossed around the idea of a combined newsroom for several years, Alloway said.
Finally, a couple years ago, five faculty members traveled to Sarasota, Fla., for a tour of the converged news operation there. Sarasota has a 24-hour-a-day cable TV news organization where reporters also write copy for a newspaper and the Web.
That sparked interest at home, Alloway said.
“We saw that as a good example of what journalism down the road is going to look like and sound like,” he said. “There’s a growing importance for students to be able to write for either industry.”
A gift from the Omaha World-Herald supported the newsroom. CEO and Publisher John Gottschalk said it was a charitable act the employee-owned newspaper thought had to be done.
“We felt it important for the state’s largest and most comprehensive news organization to participate in our state’s primary journalism education program,” he said.